The Legacy of Slavery

"Nothing so turns the tables on critics of social pathology in the black community as invoking the painful history of slavery. But because slavery has left bitter legacies, it does not follow that any particular bitter experience among blacks today can automatically be attributed to slavery. Cancer is indeed fatal, but every fatality cannot be attributed to cancer -- and certainly not after an autopsy has shown death to be due to a heart attack or gunshot wounds.

"One of the key misfortunes within the contemporary black community, from which many other misfortunes flow, is the breakdown of the family, or the failure to form a family in the first place. As of 1992, more than half of all black adults had never been married, quite aside from an additional 16 percent who had either been divorced or widowed. By contrast, only 21 percent of white adults had never been married. More than half of all black children -- 57 percent -- were living with only one parent and another 7.5 percent were not living with either parent. Thus, only a little more than a third of black children were living in traditional two-parent households. The great majority of those black children who were living with only one parent were living with their mothers, and more than half of those mothers were unmarried.

"...As in other areas where violations of societal norms have led to disasters, the first order of business for the anointed has been to turn the tables on society, which must itself be made to feel guilty for what it complains of. Blaming "a legacy of slavery" for the high level of unwed teenage pregnancy among blacks, and the abdication of responsibility by the fathers of the children, clearly performs that function. Whether it is actually true is another question -- and one receiving remarkably little attention.

"Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that the census data of that era showed a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than had white adults. This in fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940. Prior to 1890, this question was not included in the census, but historical records and contemporary observations of the Reconstruction era depicted desperate attempts of freed black men and women to find their lost mates, children, and other family members -- efforts continuing on for years and even decades after the Civil War. Slavery had separated people, but it had not destroyed the family feelings they had for each other, much less their desire to form families after they were free. As late as 1950, 72 percent of all black men and 81 percent of all black women had been married. But the 1960 census showed the first signs of a decline that accelerated in later years -- as so many other social declines began in the 1960s. This new trend, beginning a century after Emancipation, can hardly be explained as "a legacy of slavery" and might more reasonably be explained as a legacy of the social policies promoted by the anointed, especially since similar social policies led to similarly high rates of unwed motherhood in Sweden, where neither race nor slavery could be held responsible."

-- Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy; Chapter 4, The Irrelevance of Evidence